Among the goals of the new Comprehensive Housing Strategy that the Boulder City Council will discuss on Tuesday night:

1. Strengthen current commitments to households of very-low, low and moderate income

2. Prevent further loss of Boulder's middle class

3. Enable aging in place

4. Promote diverse housing in every part of the city

5. Create mixed-income, walkable "15-minute neighborhoods"

Source: City of Boulder

If you go

What: Boulder City Council meeting, featuring public hearing on Comprehensive Housing Strategy

When: 6 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Municipal Building, 1777 Broadway, Boulder

More info: To read the full council agenda and the memo on the housing strategy, visit bit.ly/W0YXS1.

On Tuesday, the Boulder City Council will discuss a new housing strategy that pins affordable housing programs, diverse housing opportunities for middle-income homes and "innovative approaches" to providing additional and broader housing options as target areas for improvement.

That the city — or its voters — must take some form of action on housing in the next couple years does not appear up for debate. Roughly 60,000 people commute every day to Boulder, and most can't afford to live here.

Even if they could, there's hardly any vacancy in which to fit them.

While Tuesday's council agenda doesn't call for any sweeping action, approving the goals set forth in the city's new Comprehensive Housing Strategy could jump-start a process that ultimately leads to actual policy.

"It's a first step in starting the conversation," City Councilwoman Mary Young said. "It's our responsibility to listen to the community and make sure that we create policy that will make this the kind of place that we want."

But what, exactly, do "we" want? It depends who you talk to.

"I think if you polled every citizen in Boulder," said Mike Marsh, of south Boulder's Martin Acres Neighborhood Association, "you'd find the majority treasure a smaller-town feel, the mountain views, and a decided absence of big city intensity — whether that's defined as tall buildings, density, crowdedness or traffic."

Marsh represents a viewpoint held by many, that Boulder, with its 55-foot building height limit and a miniscule effective growth rate since 2000, should not seek to achieve an increased carrying capacity through higher-density developments that don't necessarily jibe with a local tone that made the city so attractive in the first place.

'Our small, congenial city'

It's this line of thinking that is largely responsible for the heavy public scrutiny around projects such as the proposed mixed-use Baseline Zero or complexes like the city-sponsored Boulder Junction or the privately owned TwoNineNorth apartments, which some say are gaudy and generally a poor fit for the city.

"Is this rush to build hotels, apartments and high-end office space really what we need in Boulder?" wrote Raymond Bridge, co-chair of the sustainability-minded citizen group PLAN-Boulder County, in a Daily Camera guest opinion last week.

Demolition proceeds at the old Daily Camera site in downtown Boulder on Friday. As the city weighs a new housing strategy, debate has stirred over growth and development in Boulder. The newspaper's former headquarters is being redeveloped into a large mixed-use project in the heart of downtown Boulder. (Paul Aiken / Daily Camera)

"What has happened to our small, congenial city? And it's being ruined to enrich developers whose focus is not on what has made Boulder the wonderful place that our residents cherish," Bridge added.

That the City Council is now faced with an increasingly vocal faction asking for a pause on growth is a relatively novel incident. Ever since 1993, when the number of building permits was reduced to 1 percent of homes in Boulder, the city has hovered mostly below and sometimes slightly over that same growth rate.

The results speak for themselves: U.S. Census data shows that roughly 7.5 percent more people live here today than did in the year 2000. Subtract the extra population brought about by spikes in the University of Colorado's enrollment, and Boulder has added fewer than 1,000 people in 14 years.

"As far as growth rates go, if you can make it slower, it works better. And Boulder has shown over the years that you can legally enforce a growth rate," said Dick Harris, a former councilman and planning board member who now sits on the board of both PLAN-Boulder County and Boulder Housing Partners.

"We've just gotten ourselves into a mess here," Harris said. "We didn't grow until the market conditions got better last year, and now it's called our attention to the fact that there's plenty of money to build things.

"What they're building, to most people I talk to, is really ugly."

'They don't taste the fear'

Some developers, however, don't view their efforts as necessarily at odds with Boulder's way of life.

Lou Della Cava, the property manager behind TwoNineNorth, said building affordable and diverse housing options that benefit the working class should be viewed as every bit the quintessentially "Boulder" way of being that shunning four-story, mountain-obscuring apartment complexes has become.

"This community prides itself on inclusiveness," Della Cava said. "So which is it, folks? Do you want to house your workforce at all? Do you want to house a significant part of the minority piece? We pride ourselves on being forward-looking, and we want to restrict people from wanting to live near the city, or driving in on our roads?

"Many of the critics were condemning the cars coming in here every day, as if they were an invading pack of rodents, rather than a group of people that were working and who had dignity."

One step in the right direction, many developers would say, is to focus on squeezing higher-density projects into lower-impact areas, in an effort to assuage concerns of exclusivity while staying away from certain other spots.

"It comes down to a values discussion," said Scott Holton, of Boulder's Element Properties. "There are trade-offs we have to make to provide a place for everybody. There is a time and a place for a historic district. Not all density and height is appropriate everywhere in town.

"But there is a time and a place to provide some of the important stuff for communities to be able to thrive."

Of the PLAN-Boulder types, Della Cava added: "They don't taste the fear that they won't be able to support their families. So their focus has always been, 'I like what I have, and please don't ruin it for me.'"

One point on which all appear to agree is that there is no solution, per se, to Boulder's housing problem. There's certainly a lot to discuss and decide upon, however, going forward.

"I think what we need to do, as elected officials, is to strike balances," Councilwoman Young said. "We need to try and plan with a real forward-looking thinking. Places evolve, and they evolve over time.

MacIntyre feels Colorado is capable of making run at bowl gameCU BUFFS FALL CAMPWhen: 29 practices beginning Wednesday morning 8:30-11 a.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday practices are open to the media and public next week. Full Story

It didn't take long for Denver music observers to notice Plume Varia. Husband and wife Shon and Cherie Cobbs formed the band only two years ago, but after about a year they started finding themselves on best-of lists and playing the scene's top venues. Full Story